Fedora 8

I’ve installed Fedora 8 (replacing Fedora Core 6) on my Dell Latitude D820 laptop. I have three issues (so far) with this new install. I’ll whine about them here just in case some ghost of LazyWeb still exists and answers before I get around to researching them myself.

One of the few annoyances I have with Linux is dealing with displays — I really hate fiddling with X display configurations. After installing the latest nvidia driver from livna, my laptop likes to hang with a blank screen at boot. Cycling power will clear the problem. This is with both a dual monitor setup (laptop display and one external monitor) at work, and laptop display only at home. Both locations use the same model docking station.

I use pidgin for instant messaging, keeping several accounts open at once, on several different services. At seemingly random intervals, pidgin will suddenly begin consuming 100% CPU. This occurs while it is idle; I’ve not noticed it happening when I’ve been in a conversation. This didn’t happen under FC6.

I have a script that sets up my second desktop for research. It opens my Today and Notes directories in nautilus and starts firefox. The Today folder is actually a softlink on my desktop that points to $HOME/diary/YYYY/MM/DD/; my login script (and a midnight cron job) points the softlink to the current day’s real directory. Under FC6, nautilus would remember the size and position of Today, so that my screen came up with all the windows appropriately placed in my workspace. Now, nautilus appears to look for any remembered positioning for the softlink’s target path rather the softlink’s own path, so the first time a new day’s Today is opened, it is out of position.

I’m not blaming Fedora 8 itself for any of this, by the way; just noting that these problems started when the newer versions of these packages were installed along with Fedora 8.

Update (May 10)

After updating to kernel 2.6.24.5-85.fc8 and associated nvidia 169.12 updates from livna, most of the the system hangs have gone away; I’ve only had a couple since the upgrade.

Re nautilus, I created a bug (Bug 532296 – soft link window geometry not remembered (nautilus)) and commented on another one (Bug 92566 – Nautilus doesn’t work properly with the –geometry command line option (nautilus)) at Gnome‘s bugzilla site.

Also, I was mostly kidding with the LazyWeb reference, but it turns out that Hoosgot is the resurrected LazyWeb. Cool.

Update (Sep 7)

Added link to my Research Desktop Workspace post.

Update (Oct 27)

I’m now running Fedora 9.